I spent a half year writing software art to generate
special effects for Tron Legacy, working at Digital
Domain with Bradley "GMUNK" Munkowitz, Jake Sargeant, and
David "dlew" Lewandowski. This page has taken a long
time to be published because I've had to await
clearance. A lot of my team's work was done using
Adobe software and Cinema 4D. The rest of it got
written in C++ using OpenFrameworks and wxWidgets, the
way I've always done it with this team ;) Uniquely
however, Digital Domain's CG artists were able to port
my apps over to Houdini for further evolution and
better rendering than OpenGL could ever
provide. Special thanks to Andy King for showing me
that what seasoned CG artists do at DD is actually not
so far off from what's going on in the Processing
community.

In addition to visual effects, I was asked to record myself using a
unix terminal doing technologically feasible things. I took extra care
in babysitting the elements through to final composite to ensure that
the content would not be artistically altered beyond that
feasibility. I take representing digital culture in film very
seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly
researched user interface greeble. I cringed during the part in
Hackers (1995) when a screen saver with extruded "equations" is used
to signify that the hacker has reached some sort of neural flow or
ambiguous destination. I cringed for Swordfish and Jurassic Park as
well. I cheered when Trinity in The Matrix used nmap and ssh (and so
did you). Then I cringed again when I saw that inevitably, Hollywood
had decided that nmap was the thing to use for all its hacker scenes
(see Bourne Ultimatum, Die Hard 4, Girl with Dragon Tattoo, The
Listening, 13: Game of Death, Battle Royale, Broken Saints, and on and
on). In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a
network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill
and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell
to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs
performance -- splitting the editor into nested panes and running
different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster
movie. I actually do use emacs irl, and although I do not subscribe to
alt.religion.emacs, I think that's all incredibly relevant to the
world of Tron.

HexVirus is a spherical map of the globe that features vector outlines
of the continents. These continent vectors are slowly eaten away by a
more hexagonal representation. Algorithmically, this is a path
stepping function which looks ahead for the closest matching 60-degree
turns. The HexVirus globe was used in the executive board meeting scene,
and also inside the grid as a visual aid in CLU's maniacal plan
presentation. In the board room interface, the globe element is surrounded by the
lovely work of my team.

The scoreboard was the first element I worked on. I created a
line-generator that produced bursts of lines which turned at
adjustable angles. The line generator had "radial mode" which arranged
the geometry in concentric circle form. This line generator was used
to generate generic elements and layers of style in different things,
and is a GMUNK favorite. At this point, I found myself moving to
multisampled FBOs because the non-antialiased polygons were just too
ugly to work with, and we needed to make film-resolution renders. In
fact, this is the highst res I've ever seen my apps render.

Fireworks, mmmm. I started with a regular physics simulation where a
particle has an upward force applied at birth, sending it upward while
gravity pulls it back down resulting in a parabola. I then added
particle-children, followed by various artistic styles, including what
our team has called "egyptian" across several jobs -- which is a
side-stepping behavior. We were trying to create fireworks that looked
enough like real fireworks but had interesting techno-aesthetic. As a
homage to the original Tron character Bit, we used icosahedrons, dodecahedrons, and similar.
I was disappointed that Bit isn't in this one. After doing this simulation,
I've grown more aware of how often fireworks are used in movies.

For the portal climax, the TronLines app was used, but also apps like
"Twist" from our team's previous jobs. Once the look was mocked up by gmunk,
a houdini artist recreated the rig for deeper control.

I wrote a particle renderer that could make the head holograms
slurp in and out of the data discs. Special thanks to Keith
Pasko for CLUing me in about using exponential functions to
create a sliding-gooey sort of delay.

When fixing Quorra, there was an element in the DNA interface
called the Quorra Heart which looked like a lava lamp. I
generated an isosurface from a perlin-noise volume, using the
marching cubes function found in the Geometric Tools WildMagic
API, a truly wonderful lib for coding biodigital jazz, among
other jazzes. The isosurface was then drawn along different
axes, including concentric spheres. The app was mesmerizing to
stare at.

After this project, I was fed up enough with wxWidgets and
Carbon that I was ready to author my own OpenGL based UI. The
most important thing I could use is a floating-point slider.
I also got irritated with the way the Carbon sliders would not
slide all the way to the minimum and maximum values. It
totally messed with my zen thing. Also, after a job like
this, it's clear that a member of the Processing community
working within a CG community is greatly restricted by the differences of
realtime graphics rendering engines, and that probably messes
with an art director's zen thing.